Christ, it's been a long few days. I haven't even seenn one of my house mates since Tuesday and, if she didn't leave washing up to be done, I wouldn't even know if she were alive.

So, Wednesday was band night in dB's. Sound teching again, but this time with ear defenders which work really well. The control position in dB's is about 5 meters from a speaker stack that is pointed straight at you and it's nice not to be deaf afterwards.

Thursday was East Meets West, the Indian Society variety show. Gary has a fairly long post about it. Turns out that they has no stage crew and were just praying that it would work out or something. Either that or they expected stuff to shuffle into place on its own. So, with a couple of hours notice and a couple of phone calls we got 4 Dramsoc people to run the stage.

And I would like to point out that we were flawless. Even though we usually found out about a scene change about 5 minutes before it happened. Some people may complain that we missed a chair, but 13 were counted on, 13 people were on stage and they were one short. Fourteen were counted off. Go figure.

They overran and were kicked off at about midnight. The strike only took about one and a half hours because they got away with having parcan bars and there was no lift involved. Usually when striking we have to break everything down into lift-sized chunks which takes ages. Though I didn't really grasp exactly how much of a pain this was until now.

Last night was ChiSoc. This show was going to be an utter shambles from the start. Organisation seems be an alien concept here. They overran by about three hours because all their scene changes took 10 minutes or so.

It's not that they were big scene changes at all, but it took 10 minutes to figure who was going on next. All this was sorted about by shouting a lot of shouting in (I believe) Cantonese over the comms.

They also shouted "Fire!" a lot when talking. I didn't figure out what this meant to them.

And it seems that they killed one radio mic, has no stewards and thought the powerloc distro (415V, 600 amps) was a good place to keep bottles of water.